


Children of Earth

by labicheramure



Category: Kamen Rider W (Double)
Genre: Disturbing Themes, Gen, Horror, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2016-02-08
Packaged: 2018-05-07 01:45:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5438891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/labicheramure/pseuds/labicheramure
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As the ruins of the Sonazaki mansion are excavated, Wakana is reborn from the secret chamber underneath, but something else lurks, deep within the earth, and deeper still, within Phillip's memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He never told Shotaro he dreamed of her. Phillip didn't want to scare him, he supposed. Shotaro already worried about the Gaia Library's effect on him, on what it meant, so there was no reason to make it worse. Best let the unknowns, like the rest of this world, be for Phillip only. It wasn't as if they were dreams from inside the Library, after all. When he went for lookups, it was the same as always; clean and white, infinite and safe, no matter how far his shelves stretched back.

Only at night, when Phillip curled up with Mikku on his couch, did the inside of his mind change. In his dreams there was no Library, only an endless swamp, echoing with the sounds and shapes of life, just outside of his perception, the dark mud around his body swirling with ancient color, with ancient breath. He thought he should be afraid, but he never was, even in the moments when the swamp grew small, crowding him in with shadow. She was guiding him, so there was nothing to fear.

She would appear suddenly, always, rising from the mud like primordial life. She would wrap her arms around him and bathe his hair in clay, laughing like the sister he remembered in other, deeper dreams. The real Wakana. The only Wakana that could exist, now.

"Dear brother," she would say, giggling and kissing his cheeks. "Sweet Phillip."

He got the sense, often, that she thought of Brother and Phillip as different people. He didn't know what he thought.

Wakana never spoke in anything but these platitudes, answering his questions with kind smiles and gentle laughter.

It wasn't long at all before Phillip learned to accept her affection for what it probably was; his own mind, reaching out to comfort him with a kind of love he'd never really had. Only the strange swamp made him think otherwise. It seemed too real to be a fabrication of his own, too fully-realized. And the Library could give no answers as to where else it could have come from.

So, when he dreamed of his sister waiting for him in the center of the swamp, graceful and sad, he began to feel afraid for the first time since he had first seen her here. Her feet were tucked under her like cat's, mud caked all over her body, her eyes and mouth only barely visible. Dried red clay cracked, but did not fall off, as Wakana reached out for him.

"Raito," she said, terribly lucid as she pulled him into her arms. "I'm sorry."

"Wakana?" She stroked his head as if to quiet him, pressing his face into her shoulder. She smelled like wet earth. Could one smell, in dreams?

"We were wrong. I was wrong, our parents were wrong, everyone was wrong, treating you the way we did." Phillip swallowed. He wanted to struggle away, for some reason.

"Why are you saying this now?"

"I didn't understand anything until now. I've been seeing you all this time, but I thought it was just your dream, that all I could do was hold you. But I watched you look into the Library today. And I saw what you didn't."

Her voice was distant now, distant and hurt and terrified, for his sake. She was clinging to him so tightly it nearly hurt.

"What did you see, Wakana?" he asked, slowly, as afraid as she was, now. "What are you sorry for?"

"The reason why your memories were erased. Dad was afraid of you. Mom was afraid you, and that's why she left without taking you with her. They didn't want you unleashed."

"Unleashed?"

"I'm so sorry, Raito. I'm scared too." Wakana pulled back, grabbing his shoulders and looking him right in the eyes. They began to sink into the mud. "I don't want you to lose yourself. Promise me whatever goes in your head, you'll still be you, okay?"

All he could do, gasping around the filth of the Earth, was nod, reaching for her as she fell back, leaving only the rippling suggestion of her. His ears were filled with mud, and somewhere inside them, he could hear a deep, deep voice, calling to him.

Boy-child, I will give you my memories. I will give you the shape of reality itself, the power to know it as no one else does. Finite child, I will give you infinity.

His head went under. Mud made him blind, but beneath his stinging eyelids he saw the shape of a gigantic woman, her hips and breasts wide and fat, like the ancient fertility dolls they found in Europe. She held something out to him, and Phillip saw himself reach out with tiny fingers, feeling the warmth of the thing through his whole body.

You, whom I love, become the blade of my retribution, and yours.

www

Phillip felt it when the well was found. It was small, but unmistakably there; a trembling in the recesses of his spinal column, an inexplicable surge in his resting heart rate. A sense that something within him had been disturbed, if only slightly. He ignored it at first, returning easily to his research on human sacrifice, something he'd picked up out of the blue this morning, haunted by a blurred afterimage of Aztec ritual disembowelment. Research, he thought, would make it clearer, the light of knowledge would burn away his animal fear. And it worked, almost.

"Hey."

He'd learned long ago not to start when he was pulled out of the Library, no matter how jarring the sensory world might feel. Still, he was sure to give Shotaro a solid look of disapproval before carefully awakening himself from that common trance.

"Is this something important?" he asked, quite impatient already. He was getting better, but Shotaro had a way of showing up exactly when Phillip wanted him not to. Shotaro only smiled, as if he knew this.

"I told you the police were excavating the Sonozaki mansion, right?" He looked nervous. "They found something. It's that well, the one you...." He stopped and swallowed. The corners of his mouth rippled in a way that made Phillip's chest ache, worse than what he was hearing now.

"The one I fell in," he said softly, managing a stiff smile. "Did they find anything?"

"It's got a lot of energy coming from it, I guess. That green glowing stuff. They're having a geologist come in tomorrow, but Terui thought you might want to check it out before then."

Phillip was quiet for several moments, thoughts lost and already halfway through a lookup of everything he knew about the well. He only stopped when he realized that Shotaro was waiting for him to say something.

"He was right. There are a lot of things about it still missing in my archives. I'm sure, if I made contact..." He would find the thing that shook him up this morning, the something that put those vivid, gruesome images in his head. It was reaching for him, dropping breadcrumbs into the synapses of his human brain, whispering messages he could almost, but not quite understand.

"No one's asking you to do that, partner," Shotaro said, a hand on his shoulder. "We should wait until that geologist takes a look, shouldn't we? You're a super genius, yeah, but those guys have been studying rocks so long they could probably tell you it was a geothermal whatsit just by looking at it."

"It's not a geothermal vent, Shotaro, and you know it. Don't worry, I don't have to touch it to make contact. I can draw information from a very safe distance away, though I will need at least three 100-page notebooks, I suspect more." His partner nodded slowly, wearing a very mixed expression that could most accurately be described as half-boiled.

"I'll, uh, see what I can do. You just get ready, and stuff. Bring a real jacket this time, I'm not giving you mine again, it's cold!"

He said this on the top step, turning around just in time for Phillip to hide a smile behind his book, warm enough, he thought, that Shotaro could be his jacket, as long as he kept talking.

wwwww

Someone was calling her. Not in so many words, not with a voice or a name, for she didn't have those things anymore. She was just mind and space, so much space, empty of all but the sense that she was swimming toward something, toward someone who could return all of those things to her. She sucked in breath that became bone that became blood that became skin, all in one quiet instant. When she opened her new eyes, she found herself in an ocean of brilliant green, boiling, but not hot. The bubbles that popped by her ears sounded like people whispering about her. She swam on.

There was a face in the moon overhead. It spoke; calling for her, she was sure, but water muffled the words. His eyes ('cause wasn't it a man that was in the moon?) glittered like little stars. His smile was sweet and delicate. Though she knew it was stupid to try and swim to the moon, she reached up for him. To her surprise, he grew closer.

Wakana's first breath was an ugly hacking cough, followed by a gasp as she gracelessly fell on the red dirt. She pounded her fist into it, just once, to punish it for hitting her with such abruptness. Then, with a wet, heavy body, she pulled herself into a sitting position, looking up just in time for someone to call her name.

"Wakana!" His arms were around her instantly, so warm and so gentle that she thought nothing of becoming boneless against him. It took several moments, though, for her to place his face as anything but the pretty light of the Man In The Moon.

"Raito..." she said, cotton in her mouth, reaching up to touch his face. He looked as though he was about to cry. She watched a tear make its gentle way down his cheek, catching it with her thumb, feeling the subtle bloom of its heat. Her brother smiled.

"That's Princess Wakana, right?" said a loud voice from somewhere several feet away. Wakana turned to look, and saw Narumi, dressed in an absurdly puffy coat, shaking Raito's partner as if to snap him out of a trance. He seemed to be experiencing several emotions at once, the first, and strongest of which was an utter dumbfoundedness that looked to Raito for answers. Beside him, Accel appeared vaguely frightened.

"Yeah. Yeah, it is." Raito spoke softly as he pulled her up to stand on brittle legs, catching her when she slipped on the wet dirt. When she was stable, he lay the back of his hand on her cheek. "Ah, you're warm. Ninety-nine degrees, at least. It's probably just shock, but you need to come home with us, regardless. Shotaro!"

His partner jumped to attention, immediately shedding his own coat to wrap it around her shoulders, nervous, as if he thought she would hit him if his hands lingered too long. She would, but that was really beside the point. Flanking her on either side, the two of them walked her slowly toward where Narumi and the cop were waiting, something she vaguely recognized as the staircase that first took her down to see the well, now marked off with caution tape wrapped around warped railings. It had the feeling of an ancient ruin, of the very first time she saw the well, the first time she saw someone fall in it. Suddenly, she couldn't wait to leave.

"You're not gonna make her get on a motorcycle like that, are you?" Narumi said, hovering over her with a motherly look that didn't seem to fit her middle-schooler face. "She'll freeze!"

"We'll call the RevolGarry for her." Hidari Shotaro was calmer now, drawing composure from seemingly nowhere, as was his greatest and strangest skill. "I think there's heat in there. Right, Phillip?"

"There isn't," Raito said. "But I'll ride with her."

Hidari looked for a moment as if he would protest, but in the end, he said nothing, just tipped his hat as he passed her, struggling with the door for a moment before Narumi lifted the handle for him. She and Accel followed him, leaving Wakana and Raito alone, for a moment.

"Thank you," she said, without really knowing why. Her brother smiled, but for just a moment, before he took her hand, she thought he looked very, very afraid.

\-----

Wakana was quiet on the ride home. She grumbled halfheartedly about the smell of Shotaro's jacket as they got in, but Phillip was certain she was only doing it because Shotaro was within earshot. Once they were alone, she only leaned against him and cried softly. He tried to speak and comfort her, but she hit him with a clumsy fist, like a child.

"I'm so selfish," she said finally, hiding her face in his shoulder. "I did all that, but in the end I just cried until I got to see you again." He smiled and tried to swallow the lump that was forming in his throat. His voice still shook when he spoke.

"It's okay. I wouldn't be here, you know, if you hadn't been selfish."

By the time they got home, both of them had managed to dry their eyes, though Shotaro gave him a brief look as he took Wakana downstairs, one that told him they would talk later. Phillip tried not to think about what he might say, if only because he knew he wouldn't have answers for him either way. Not when his library smelled of wet earth when he closed his eyes. Not when his sister vomited mud as soon as they were both away from prying eyes.

"Gross," she said, clicking her tongue as she stared at the deep brown gunk in the bottom of his trashcan. "Stupid well."

"It's a cenote." Wakana started and stood up, searching his face. Phillip was sure she would find nothing, because he didn't know why he said it himself. "It's a naturally occurring kind of sinkhole. The caves down there - they're all limestone. That's why it's so deep. It was probably made by groundwater thousands of years ago when -- "

He stopped. Wakana was staring at him with a face twisted up, the caught-up breath shaped in the lines of her mouth, her eyes wide and helpless, doll-like. Without warning, she dropped to her knees, nails sliding across the trashcan with an ugly sound as she sank.

"Raito," she said. She looked as though she was swallowing stone. "How do you know that it's deep?"

He couldn't answer her.

wwwww

The detective agency's shower ran hot, spitting steam and water with an uneven force that almost hurt. To Wakana, it felt perfect. She watched her skin grow pink, watched and wondered at the length of her nails, her hair. It seemed longer than it should have been, cleaner, as if all the heat and product she put into it over the years had been stripped away. She found herself looking over her body for scars she remembered, for the birthmark behind her left knee. They weren't there.

When Wakana got out of the shower, she took a long time to look in the bathroom mirror, to memorize her features. Her face did not look or feel like something she owned. Without makeup on, she was like a female twin of Raito's, or he was a male twin of hers. She felt as though she had been subsumed into him, reborn from the well as an extension of his body. A collection of data, that only thought itself to be Sonozaki Wakana.

"Um, Princess? Milady?" Hidari was knocking impatiently on the door. "I know you have your beauty routines or whatever, but there's only one bathroom, so, if you would..."

She grabbed a towel from the rack, wrapped herself in it, then opened the door so fast that Hidari yelped and jumped backward.

"As if anyone could do anything with what you have in there," she said, pushing past him. "And don't call me that. It makes having to use your shower that much more humiliating."

"You...!"

Wakana shut the basement door behind her before he could say any more.

Raito was in the middle of a lookup when she got down, copying words from a blank book on to his whiteboard, switching rapidly between Japanese, English, and what appeared to Spanish. Behind him was a pair of pajamas neatly laid out for her; he neither spoke nor turned around while she changed into them, or after, when she walked around to sit on top of the desk. If she looked closely, she could see his lips moving, murmuring to himself, absorbing information faster than most people could think.

"Ah! I understand now!" His book snapped shut. "It's because of you!"

"What is?"

"Before," he said. "I couldn't access any information about the well, only what my human memory had. For some reason, though, your return has unlocked whatever door was keeping me from those books."

"Ah, I see." Wakana fell silent. Raito didn't seem to understand why she wasn't excited. It was about as much as she expected, but it still made her want to throw something at him. She shifted off the desk, stood next to him and leaned on the whiteboard, so close she could see the thick lashes of his half-wild eyes. "Hey, Raito... Has there ever been anything in the Library that you were too afraid to learn?"

He was quiet a long while. He chewed his lower lip, drew nervous circles on his palm with a capped marker. Her brother's breath seemed heavy. "I can't afford to be afraid of the well anymore, Wakana," he said. He was trying his hardest not to look at her.

"They say the more you try not to be scared of something, the stronger a hold it has on you."

"I never heard that."

But then, if he hadn't, why did the look he gave her make her think he was about to drown?

wwwwwww

Wakana didn't go to sleep until three A.M., though that was partially his fault. She was right; he was afraid, not of the Library's knowledge of wells and cenotes and rivers running through limestone, but of his own smaller, stranger human brain, into which echoed images and sounds he could not explain, inside which was a void he could feel, now that he knew what to look for. He tried to fill it, or forget it, with idle talk about their latest case, which involved a very unpleasant, paranoid man who wanted them to find evidence that his wife was cheating on him. They didn't, but they did watch a new horror movie when they followed her into the theater. She laughed, when Phillip told her about the scene in which the shadow of a gaffer's mic could be seen, dripping fake blood.

When he left her, she was curled neatly on the couch, her limbs pulled far in, like a cat's. Her thumbnail brushed her bottom lip. He copied the motion, briefly stunned at its familiarity. He wondered if such reflexive actions were inherited, but it didn't seem likely. Things like that were either inborn motions shared by all young humans, or else behavior learned for its own, forgotten, reasons. Mikku wound his way around his feet when he opened the door, then jumped up on the couch with an ease that seemed very counter to his weight, settling next to Wakana's head without disturbing her in the least.

Shotaro was still awake, his small, antique desk lamp created a dim halo around his face as he read one of his English novels, the kind he only picked up when he was trying very hard not to sleep. He still jumped, though, when Phillip closed the basement door behind him, blinking owlishly as he slipped his shoes off and went to wait for him on the bed.

"You didn't have to wait up for me, you know," Phillip said. Shotaro immediately looked away, mouth set in a pout, as if he'd been accused of something.

"I couldn't sleep," he said, setting a mark in his book, though he made no move to stand. "That's all."

"You wouldn't sleep. There's a difference." Shotaro made a little sound, not-quite like a sigh, that Phillip recognized as him acknowledging he was caught but asking him to drop the subject anyway, which he was happy to do, because it wasn't the point.

"How is she?"

"She's sleeping now," Phillip said. "She needs to rest."

"So do you." Shotaro was standing now, hands hovering about Phillip's shoulders like he wanted to pull him into his arms, but he didn't, and for a moment, Phillip resented him for it. He tangled their fingers together instead, pulling Shotaro's hand to his chest so he could look at it instead of his worried face. "You must be exhausted."

"I'm scared," he admitted quietly. "I have so little to base it off of, but I feel like something is about to happen. Wakana won't be the last thing to come out of that well."

Shotaro did pull him close this time, awkwardly sliding into bed and touching their foreheads together so that he could see his eyes. In them, Phillip could see his own uneasiness reflected, half-boiled instincts reassuring him that he wasn't in the least bit off base. He closed his eyes, felt his mind begin to sink. He really was so tired.

"We'll take care of it," Shotaro said, with surprising firmness. "No matter what it is, we won't let it make anyone cry."

But, Shotaro, said a voice inside him, arising as the last threads of his consciousness came undone; both his voice, and not. What if it's me?


	2. Chapter 2

Surprisingly, not so much changed, with Wakana living at the agency. There was one more cup of coffee left out in the morning, one more person to order takeout for, to vie for hot water in the evening. Phillip had company on his lookups, more often than not, which was more comfort than convenience, because they ran out of whiteboard twice as fast. But it was nice, leaning over his blank book with someone else who could see the immense Library spilled out on its pages. It was nice, not having to go there alone.

Even Shotaro was adjusting better than he would have given him credit for, though he still insisted having a woman there made it difficult for a man to work. When Phillip pointed out that Akiko was a woman, he said she didn't count, and she threw her slipper at him from across the room. Wakana seemed to think that Phillip should be offended too, though she wouldn't explain why, when he asked.

"Some things you need to pick up on your own, Raito," she said. She still called him by that name, even though he knew it made the others uncomfortable, even though, more than once, saw Shotaro open his mouth to tell her not to, and Phillip had to shake his head to get him to close it again. He didn't know how he felt about. Raito felt like somebody else, a hole in his memories so sharp and exact he thought sometimes he could feel the scar tissue that formed around it. But Wakana said that name with a warmth that filled and soothed it, so he let her keep it, and anything else of him she might want.

Shotaro took to pulling him outside for walks or rides; things that Phillip thought could be dates, if only he would call them that. Winter was not over, but Fuuto had been unseasonably warm lately, blanketed in the healing salt wind that rose from the ocean. The scent of it was almost enough to cleanse the wet earth from his nose, so he was glad to take his partner's hand and lead him down poorly-paved roads to the places where strange old women read palms and tried to sell them aphrodisiacs. Phillip was disappointed, but not surprised when Shotaro turned very red and refused to buy anything.

"Ah," he said suddenly, stopping in place and nearly making Phillip run into him. He seemed to have trouble walking and thinking at the same time. "That's right, that shrine is around here."

"A shrine?" Did he know, somehow, why Phillip had been so often late to bed these past few weeks? "There's no shrine here on any of the municipal maps I looked up, and they date all the way to the prewar era."

"Well, it was pretty little," Shotaro said. "And it looked pretty old. But there were definitely still offerings getting left there and junk."

As if guided by unseen signposts, he took an abrupt turn into a space between buildings too small to be considered an alley, small enough that even Phillip had to sidle through to get to the other side. There was faded graffiti on the walls, clumsily done and clumsily painted over, with the strange exception of a short phrase written in charcoal. It made him stop for a moment, to the point where Shotaro had to call him to catch up.

glory, for he who comes

It looked almost as though it had been burnt into the wall, but he only allowed himself one more glance before he followed Shotaro again. They climbed over a small retaining wall, into and through an unfinished subdivision project that had fallen through during the financial crisis. It had only been left empty since November, but already nature, or winter, at least, had reclaimed it, littering sidewalks and streets with wet leaves. Melting snow left puddles that Shotaro gingerly helped him over, his hand lingering delicate at the small of his back. The whole time he was strangely quiet, as if it took all his concentration to remember this strange shrine from his childhood that wasn't on any maps but that he seemed very sure existed anyway.

"It's here, I think." They both slid careful down a small hill made of gravel from the construction, into a dense little bamboo grove that seemed out of place amid the wintering oaks that surrounded it. The shrine lay at the bottom of the hill, a crude stone thing the size and shape of a roadside Inari shrine, mossy and cracked, but still cleaned off regularly. Kneeling down, Phillip could the remains of a piece of stick incense that was blown away, along with a few burnt out tealights. He had to get down on his knees to see what was inside; a tiny little driftwood statue, shaped not like a Buddha or a fox, but as a woman, with strange dark holes for eyes and hair made from seaweed. It looked too ancient to be a part of this shrine, as if it had been housed somewhere else long ago, then usurped the god of this place; like a cuckoo pushing its rivals from the nest.

"You're the only person in the world who would get down and peek into a shrine," Shotaro said, kneeling to pull him to his feet. They rose together, Shotaro's hand still resting soft at the crook of his elbow. Standing up made Phillip feel dizzy. He looped his arms around his partner's neck, and his head became light and wild as a storm-cloud. He fell against him, gasping with breath he didn't know he held. Shotaro's heart-rate was increasing, but Phillip couldn't will his own to be quiet enough for him to count the beats. "Hey. Hey, you alright?"

"I think I forgot to eat breakfast." It was a lie. He had made toast and eggs at 4:37 AM. He was still very proud of himself for not burning anything. "We need to go home. The sun is going to set in forty-five minutes."

It wasn't, it was going to set in eight minutes. What an odd thing to lie about. He tried to correct himself, but Shotaro was busy trying to haul them both back up the hill, so he decided to help out instead, letting Shotaro support one shoulder while they picked their way up the slippery hill that was actually, they were discovering, just a particularly solid pile of rocks. By the time they made it, Shotaro was panting with his hands on his knees, and Phillip, with no support, fell to his knees, folding them neatly under him. His head only stayed upright as a formality.

"We need to call Akiko, don't we?" Phillip nodded. A warm wind was picking up around them, caressing his cheeks, asking him to stay, just a bit longer. He politely declined, but he could tell the wind was displeased with him. It lay at his back, pressing irritably on his shoulders until he gave up, and lay his heavy head against the earth.

Far away, Shotaro was telling Akiko that, yes, Wakana could come if she absolutely had to, just hurry up, alright. Closer, much too close, the Earth was measuring his heart-rate, counting it, beat for beat.

\----

After that, Phillip slept and woke in short bouts, sometimes sliding neatly into pleasant nothing; other times feeling as though he'd only blinked and the sun was gone, blinked again and he was in bed with a wet cloth over his eyes. Like a machine, being turned on and off. The thought made him feel sick. He rolled over to face the curtain, pulling the cloth down to his neck. It was already warm from his skin, and his eyes seemed to hate even the dim lamplight filtering in through the curtain. He used to wish he was a machine. If he could only stop feeling hunger and cold and loneliness, lookups would be so much easier, he thought.

The first night, Begins Night, Shotaro would not stop touching him. He shoved him through the agency door, held his hand gently as he cleaned a small but deep cut in the web of his thumb. Eventually he was overcome by his own grief, and he slid to the floor, laying his head on Phillip's lap. It hurt, somehow. Not on his body, but in his chest, blooming heavy from within his heart. It was as if Shotaro had awoken his humanity, long-buried and flawed as it was, and all at once made him realize the loneliness he wished away as a child buried in a place where he was not allowed to be touched. For a long while, Phillip resented him for it. Now, laying fevered and alone, his unfurled heart called for him, and he resented Shotaro again.

"...He just collapsed?" Wakana was asking. "Nothing at all triggered it?"

He heard Shotaro make a noise of frustration. Phillip could hear them clearly, but they cast no shadows across the curtain at all. They must be in the entry room, he thought. Why aren't they closer, he asked.

"We went to this little shrine I remembered from when I was a kid," Shotaro said. "He went down to peek into it, and when I pulled him up he couldn't stand right. He said he didn't eat breakfast. He was fine, before that."

"Low blood sugar doesn't cause a fever except in very extreme cases." Wakana paused. She wasn't used to this information coming so suddenly, he knew. It disturbed her. "He's sick."

Shotaro was guiltily quiet for several moments. Outside, the wind tapped at their window, calling to Phillip. It promised that if he only got up, and came outside, he would feel cool and safe and so much better. Perhaps it was right, but he still found himself glad he didn't have the strength to move.

"I keep telling him to wear more layers." He heard Shotaro scratch at his starch-stiff collar, half muttering to himself. "Damn crazy wind... It felt fine when we left."

"You're acting more like his mother than his lover," Wakana said, as if she wasn't sure which option deserved more of her scorn. Phillip felt rather than heard his partner swallow.

"Ah, so, you knew about that," he said. "Of course you knew about that. You've been showering at ungodly hours here for over a month." Wakana let out a short bark of laughter.

"Don't tell me you thought you were hiding it! He talks like you hung the moon, you know. And you're in bed together every time I get up."

"You took the couch," Shotaro said lamely.

"I don't really care what you're doing," Wakana said, a little more subdued, even kind. "So don't expect me to tell you to take care of him properly. Just keep in mind that you're lucky to have someone like him, alright?"

"I know that!" There was a strained thread in Shotaro's voice. The breath of sleep slid into Phillip's mouth. He turned the cloth over and laid it back on his head. "Believe me..."

When he woke up again, the shape of their little window cast a square moon on the curtain, and Shotaro was a warm shape beside him. Phillip rolled over to face his curved back, restless, pressing his lips against the vaguely circular birthmark at the top of his spine. Shotaro mumbled and squirmed, but did not speak. He blew into it.

"Go back to sleep, Phillip." He shifted up to sigh against Shotaro's shoulder.

"What time is it?"

"Time for you to rest," Shotaro said. Reluctantly, he rolled around to face him. His eyes were heavy with worry. Phillip caught his left hand in his, threading their fingers together and pulling it to his lips.

"I'm not sick," he said, kissing his partner's wrist.

"I know." Shotaro made like he was going to pull his hand away, but Phillip held fast. "Something's happening, isn't it?"

"Something is calling me," Phillip said. "It called me tonight, when I saw the idol in the shrine. It wasn't supposed to be in there."

He watched Shotaro's throat work to swallow, reflecting the fear he knew must be burned crude over his own face. He felt as though he was being slowly uprooted from the surety he'd gained over the past half-year, from the rational world of his Library to a place made of dreams and dread, with only intuition to guide him. He squeezed Shotaro's hand tighter, and willed himself to be kept still. They lay like that, close and uncertain, until the square moon on the curtain became a sun, sometimes talking and planning, sometimes quiet, but never once looking away.


	3. Chapter 3

That night, Wakana dreamt of her brother. He wore a white kimono, like a buried corpse, and walked, slowly, through a peat bog that she somehow knew no longer existed in this world. His hair was wet, his skin transparent, gleaming with sweat. His eyes were a soft green, like jade. Like bile. In the center of the bog, he came upon a house built of piled up mud and moss. Raito did not enter, but went to his knees in front of it, sitting in modest seiza even as his kimono went loose and billowed around him.

"You called me here," he said to the shifting darkness inside of the house. "You haven't called me since I was a child."

You are a child still.

It was nothing but a deep, churning echo, impossible to identify as words unless one already knew what it would say. Raito knew, and Wakana knew.

"You called me here," he repeated.

Do you like what you found in the well?

"She said she returned on her own," Raito said. "All you could have done was allow her to escape you."

The thing inside the house laughed, gentle and terrible.

You are such an unkind little boy, aren't you? You forget how much I indulge you.

"Forgive me." His breath seemed heavy, tired. "I only speak out of turn because I was brought up poorly."

The water was rising, slowly. Raito sat still, his hands remaining folded on his knees. Neither he nor the voice spoke until it was near his shoulders.

Your heart aches still, little one. Why?

"I can't remember being her brother. I can't remember being anyone's child but yours. Even that, I only have when you call me."

The water was at his neck, now. From it, an earth-red hand rose, tucking his hair behind his ear.

You are always my child, unnamed one. Because you are my child, whom I love, I will not give you more memories than you can carry. You cannot understand what I have given you, not yet. You will.

"Mother!" he gasped, reaching for her red hand with his white, white fingers, only to feel it shatter. "Give me my name!"

Very well.

Raito's head went under.

0.

wwwwwwww

The next time Wakana answered the agency's phone, it was the archaeologist woman. She was brisk and pleasant, almost excited. She said she had found something very interesting concerning the well. She said she recognized her from the day they visited her office. She asked her name. Wakana did not hesitate in the slightest when she told her that her name was Nora Charles. There was a smile in the woman's voice when she spoke again.

"Miss Charles, are the detectives available right now?"

They weren't. It was seven AM, and they were curled around each other, Shotaro's head hidden under her brother's long hair. That they hadn't heard the old phone screaming was a miracle, clearly designed to irritate her into regretting ever deciding to wake up early. Were professors always up at such ridiculous hours?

"I'm afraid they're still asleep," Wakana said. She wasn't their secretary, no reason not to be honest. "If I hadn't been here by chance you wouldn't be hearing anything from them until ten at the least."

The woman paused a moment, considering. Wakana tapped her nails on the desk, only to find that they were too short to make much noise. She clicked her tongue.

"Well then," Fujimoto said. "Are you available, Miss Charles? I would love if you would meet me for breakfast."

Wakana was not sure why she agreed to breakfast, but she did. After the phone call, she got up from the desk, moved past her sleeping brother, gathered her things, and spent the next hour showering and making herself up. She was not so wild as she would have normally been, but instead played the part of a secretary on her day off, hair pulled back in a neat ponytail, a plain blouse. It was what she imagined someone named Nora Charles would wear.

The professor wanted to meet at a café Wakana had never seen before, a tiny place in the shopping district called Columbiana. It smelled like coffee and spices, and was decorated in bright swaths of woven cloth and wild-looking foreign masks. College students sat at painted wooden tables, drinking from ceramic mugs and chatting over leather journals or worn sketchbooks. Everyone seemed to be wearing way too many scarves. When she came in, Fujimoto was already waiting for her, already prodding at a steaming omelet. Her hair was undone from its braid, falling around her shoulders like a wild, curling veil. Her foreign heritage was never more obvious, or striking.

"Hello, Miss Charles," she said, in English. It took Wakana several moments to realize that she actually knew enough of it to respond.

"Hello," Wakana said, uncertainly. The Library was all well and good for reading English, but speaking was a different matter, she was sure. Carefully, she pulled out a chair and sat down, her hands folded in her lap. "Is all of this really so private? What exactly do you have to tell me?"

"To be honest, I was testing you." The woman paused, took a careless sip of her coffee. "You gave me such an obviously foreign name, you know."

"It's my name," Wakana said. "The only name you should call me." The professor smiled.

"I apologize," she said. "I should know better than to make these sorts of assumptions. I'm sure you have been sitting here wondering what sort of foreigner I am, and why a foreigner is named Fujimoto."

"Maybe." Wakana frowned, going quiet. She felt as though she was being made fun of, but she couldn't tell how. A teenager in a tie-dyed shirt came by, and she ordered a mocha with cream. She asked if she wanted whole or soy. She said she would take it black with sugar, instead.

The Fuuto Historical Society called me yesterday," Fujimoto said. "Mr. Arisugawa told me that there was an oral history he recorded several years ago that he thought might have something to do with the old map. He gave it to me to listen to, but my Japanese isn't good enough to get more than the gist of old regional dialects like that. I thought it would be best to give it to the detective, since he's native to the area.

She reached behind her chair and pulled up a canvas bag, digging through it a moment before pulling out an old cassette. There was a label taped on it with masking tape, peeling at the edges. Toshio's Grandma, 1998.

"Toshio was one of his students. From what I could gather, his grandmother was the daughter of one of the last remaining adherents to the cult of a local deity that had been around since ancient times. It seems her worship was once based around a hidden well in which clay effigies were thrown and broken in the dry season, until a particularly nasty earthquake buried it. Fuuto was all but abandoned not long after that, but the grandmother's ancestors remained."

Clay effigies. Clay dolls. Somewhere in the back of her memory, Wakana could feel her own body shattering into pieces of brittle earth. In someone else's, she could feel tiny fingers, clawing vainly at slick mud. Fujimoto went quiet for a moment, watching her.

"Go on," Wakana said. The waitress returned with her coffee. It smelled like wet wood. "I'm listening."

"I never said you weren't," said Fujimoto. "Toshio's great-grandfather believed that the ancient goddess spoke to him. He said that she told him that she loved Fuuto dearly, but she would need a great sacrifice in order to protect it from the coming hardships. This was right around the war, you see. Very soon after he told her this, one of the grandmother's friends disappeared. The police found her laying facedown in the reservoir, several days later."

Blood can be given without problem, she told her father, shutting the door behind her, locking the room in which her brother slept. It means nothing at all to me. A person's breath is all of him, all of the words and cries and happy sounds he will ever make. If I have his breath, there is nothing that can stop me. It turned out not to be true at all, of course. Even with that ancient wisdom inside of her, Wakana had forgotten that she only every borrowed Raito's sacred breath.

"And then?"

"He was arrested for the girl's murder, and he died in prison a year later. The reported cause was heart failure, but it the grandmother insisted he was cursed by the goddess." Fujimoto folded her hands thoughtfully. "She seemed very afraid. I couldn't understand everything she said, but there was something about a nightmare, I think. And the shape of a child, rising up from - somewhere, either under the ground or - " She paused. Her eyes widened, slowly.

"Or what?" Wakana snapped.

"Or, rising from the bottom of a well."


End file.
